Tag Archives: 137 Books in One Year

Speaking at Ignite Minneapolis

Ignite MinneapolisTonight I’m speaking at Ignite Minneapolis. It’s a unique conference where presenters only get 5 minutes. You’re also given 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. It’s kind of a lightning round approach to presentations and it should both be fascinating and scary.

The topics are all over the map, but the general theme is good ideas. I’ll be talking about how to read a lot, basically drawing on my book 137 Books in One Year: How to Fall in Love With Reading.

I’ll be covering some of my recent favorites, including Ready Player One, The Fault in Our Stars, The Martian and The Time Traveler’s Wife.

I’ll be sharing 10 reading tips roughly pulled from 137 Books in One Year:

  1. Take a book everywhere.
  2. Read it.
  3. Read for you.
  4. If you don’t like it, stop.
  5. Figure out your patterns.
  6. Track your reading.
  7. Have a next book.
  8. Find books.
  9. Share what you read.
  10. Create a habit of reading.

The event should be streaming live so you can watch from home. It starts at 7 p.m. Central and I’m on halfway through the second half (so maybe around 8:30?).

My favorite comment about presenting at the event comes from Julio Ojeda-Zapata: “So scary, so worth it.” That’s about how I feel at the moment, though probably veering into scary. My wife keeps telling me it’s only five minutes. Though they’re either going to be the longest or shortest five minutes of my life.

Genre Shame is a Waste of Time

I made a comment in 137 Books in One Year that genre shame is a waste of time. It’s something I learned through my reading, but I found the sentiment most eloquently expressed by Veronica Roth in her post Shame: The Ultimate Time Vampire. Roth is the author of the young adult dystopian thriller Divergent, which she wrote while studying creative writing at Northwestern University.

Writing that kind of a genre-specific book in that kind of a literary-focused environment, you learn a thing or two about genre shame. Much of Roth’s post talks about the writing end of genre shame.

But she also starts with the fact that genre shame kept her from enjoying reading for years:

The last time (excluding the past three months) that I remember loving to read was eighth grade. That’s right: eight years ago. What happened, you ask? People told me I was too smart to read what I liked to read. They said I should be reading “college-level books.” I started to feel ashamed of what I wanted to read, and I tried to read what I was “supposed” to be reading. But the problem was that I didn’t enjoy those books, and I couldn’t force myself to enjoy them, and I hated feeling like I was stupid for not liking them, so I stopped reading altogether.

That’s complete and total crap.

A book has to be snooty enough to be worth your time? Please. We should read because we enjoy it, not because we have to. Not because it’s good for us. Not because it’s labeled a classic. There are so many classics that have ruined reading for people because they were forced through an awful book. If I had to read Tess of the D’Ubervilles again I probably would give up on reading.

I can’t finish a Hemingway novel.

I hated Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

I have zero interest in Charlotte Bronte.

But you know what? That’s OK. Read what you love. It’s OK to read that smut novel. Or yet another vampire story. Or more space marines. Whatever floats your boat.

Go ahead, it’s OK.

Don’t waste your time being ashamed of your favorite genres. Don’t feel like you have to read the classics because they’re the classics. Whatever. Find your own classics (I’ve started my own list).

I love reading young adult fiction with teen characters struggling to find out who they are (13 Reasons Why).

I love reading realistic space sci-fi, light on the aliens, heavy on the application of big ideas (Old Man’s War).

I even have a soft spot for a good zombie novel (Zone One).

And I’ve mentioned my love for post-apocalyptic sci-fi too many times (Wool).

If you like the classics, great. But don’t force them on the rest of us. Read what you love, and don’t be ashamed.

Some of My Favorite Books

While writing my recent book, 137 Books in One Year: How to Fall in Love With Reading, I tried to reflect on some of my favorite books of all time, and especially what makes them my favorite books.

These kinds of lists are always hard and weirdly defined and vary greatly from one person to the next. So you’ll have to bear with me. I stuck to fiction and a sense of longevity, which I’ll try to explain next.

It seems that some of my favorites are books I keep coming back to. Either I remember the plot even decades later or the ideas the stories brought up just keep coming back to my mind. To be a real favorite it needed to have that kind of longevity. There are books I loved, but years later I couldn’t tell you what happened. Those are still good books, but they didn’t quite make my vaguely defined cut.

So here are some of my favorite fiction books from throughout my reading life:

Ask me tomorrow and I’d probably come up with a different list, but there you go. Oddly enough, few of my favorite authors ended up in the list (such as Anne Lamott, Barbara Kingsolver, Madeleine L’Engle, etc.), perhaps because while I love their writing, often their stories either don’t stand out or blur together because I’ve read so many of them. I couldn’t tell you plot points in Crooked Little Heart or Prodigal Summer, but I did love those books when I read them. For whatever reason, they just didn’t stick with me (perhaps candidates for a re-read?).

So what are some of your favorite books (regardless of how you define ‘favorite’)?

Talking About Books: Annotated Bookshelf

In case you can’t tell, I like talking about books. That’s what happens when you write an entire book about how to read more books.

I’ve been writing about some of my favorite books lately, but sometimes it’s more fun to stand in front of your bookshelf and do it. So here’s a shot of one of the bookshelves in our house. Click over to Flicker and mouse over the image to see a whole bunch of ridiculously annotated notes about the books (and other things). It’s kind of fun (and, yes, kind of weird).

Though not as weird as sorting your books by color.

My Book Shelf (G-Z)

Bonus: I wrote a guest post on Ally Vesterfelt’s blog about doing what you love, inspired by that whole reading a bunch of books in one year thing.

Using Scrivener to Write & Publish Books

When I wrote 137 Books in One Year: How to Fall in Love With Reading I tried a new writing software. I used to stick with Microsoft Word for everything. But I’ve been increasingly annoyed with it lately and I’ve experimented with some other options. I eventually landed on Scrivener and I’m not going back.

Scrivener is designed for writing book-length projects, whether it’s a novel, script, nonfiction or something else. It allows you to rearrange chunks of text as you go. You can switch to a corkboard view with each chunk of text on an index card with a title and summary. Then just move the cards around if you want. It makes organizing the structure of your book a whole lot easier.

You can also tag and index things like crazy, so for a novel you could note which chunks of text which characters appear in and easily find all those places.

You can also keep everything related to your project in one spot, whether it’s notes, research or drafts. When I’ve done books in Microsoft Word before I’ve always had a growing pile of supporting documents—an outline, a timeline, a list of characters, a list of things I need to tweak, etc. With Scrivener you can keep it all in the same spot. You can tag things and quickly view only what you need to.

If you’ve ever had to write a project of any length you’re probably starting to see the possibilities. And I’m just scratching the surface of Scrivener’s features.

But perhaps the best part of Scrivener is when you’re done writing. It allows you to export your work to whatever format you need in a process known as compiling. This is where it rocks. You can export to vastly different formats with completely different layouts and looks, all using the same source material.

So with 137 Books in One Year I spit out a CreateSpace-ready PDF for my 5×8 print version of the book, as well as a Kindle-ready ebook file that I could upload directly to Amazon. That would require two separate files in Microsoft Word, which would mean making any further changes in two places. Lame. Nevermind that setting up those kind of files in Word will make you want to punch someone. It’s not completely perfect in Scrivener and I’m still learning, but it’s light years better.

I originally heard about Scrivener from this post on how to create a book from idea to Kindle in 29 days, but since then I’ve seen other writers talking about it, including Jeff Goins and Michael Hyatt.

Reading on an iPhone

Reading Fat Vampire on an iPhoneI’ve never been big on digital reading, but I might be converting.

My experience with digital reading usually involves borrowing my wife’s iPad. That’s problematic because it’s hers so she gets dibs. That makes it hard to read a book whenever I have an idle moment (yes, one of the many lessons in my how to read more book). I did read the entire Hunger Games series on her iPad, but in general I don’t like having to share the device.

Then last week I noticed the book Fat Vampire by Johnny B. Truant was free for the Kindle, so I grabbed it. This was potentially problematic because I wasn’t sure how to get the book from my account on my iPhone to my wife’s account on her iPad (I don’t even know if it’s possible or not—I imagine there’s a way, but this just shows you how little I’ve experimented with digital books).

I never considered just reading it on my iPhone, but the prospect of figuring out how to transfer the book and having to share my wife’s device made me give it a try.

So I read Fat Vampire on my iPhone.

iPhone Reading Verdict?
Good book. And I loved the reading experience.

I thought the small screen would be irritating. I thought flipping pages more often would get old. I thought having so many other distractions on my iPhone would pull me away from the book. Nope, nope and nope.

The screen displayed the right amount of text and a comfortable size. Flipping pages more often was no big deal. If anything, having less text visible at a time made it faster to read because I didn’t keep losing my place when there were a lot of distractions. I also found it super convenient to have a book in my pocket. I take my phone everywhere, so I had a book everywhere (another lesson from 137 Books in One Year).

I’m curious how it would go reading a longer book. Fat Vampire was pretty short and that seemed to help. I might yearn for the printed page with a longer book. My only real complaint with digital reading is not having an immediate sense of how much of the book I have to go. There’s a progress bar that shows your percent read, but you don’t always see that. A physical book you can just feel how much you have to go. I like the reality of a printed book, especially that it’s easy to share and it retains value. But the experience itself is just as good, if not better for some things.

So I might be doing more digital reading now.

I guess iPhone reading shouldn’t come as a surprise. According to Jim Kukral, 62% of people said they’d read a book on their iPhone.

Fat Vampire?
OK, I know you’re wondering: Fat Vampire? I first heard about the book when researching how to create Kindle books and came across Truant’s post about taking only 29 days to go from idea to Kindle publication. That’s impressive, but it’s not enough to get me to read your book. What got me to read his book was the idea: If vampires never grow old and always heal, then what if a fat person is turned into a vampire? Will they always be fat? Fat Vampire turns the normal vampire story upside down by exploring this funny angle. The 29 days thing is cool, but the idea sold the book.

137 Books in One Year is Free

Today’s the day. The Kindle version of my new booklet, 137 Books in One Year: How to Fall in Love With Reading is now free on Amazon. Grab yourself a copy and tell your friends.

Here’s the video:

Here’s the dorky little graphic you can share on Facebook:

137 Books in One Year promo graphic
Save this image and post it to Facebook to spread the word about my book. Don’t forget to send people to Amazon: amzn.com/B00B3HLOA4/ Thanks!

Here’s my top 15 books of 2012 and the full list of all 137 books I read in 2013.

Don’t forget to grab the Kindle version for free.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on reading:

  • What keeps you from reading more?
  • What are some of your favorite books?
  • What’s your favorite genre?

What I’ve Read in 2013

My favorite book of 2013: The Time Traveler's WifeYeah, yeah, yeah: Last year I read 137 books. What have I done lately?

In January 2013 I managed to read 14 books. If I keep up that pace I’ll be reading 168 books this year. So whatever I learned last year and poured into my booklet 137 Books in One Year, it works.

Reading what you love is still great advice. The books I loved last month I flew through. One was 766 pages, but I read it in a few days. If you love it, the length doesn’t matter (the opposite is also true: The 550-page The Book Thief took me about a week because I didn’t love it).

Finding good books is important. A lot of my favorites this month were suggestions from Adam Shields (who I interviewed in 137 Books in One Year). I also stuck to favorite authors (Anne Lamott, Madeleine L’Engle, John Scalzi, David Levithan) and favorite genres (space-focused sci-fi, post-apocalyptic sci-fi).

Libraries are awesome. Ten of 14 books came from the library. And eight of those I requested. Learn how to use your library to get the most out of it.

Here are my favorite reads from the past month:

  • The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger – A time traveling love story sounds nerdy, but it’s head- and heart-spinning. A celebration of love against all challenges, even time. It’s likely this will be my favorite book of 2013 (yes, a bold claim to make on February 4, but I’ll bet it easily makes the top 5, if not the top spot).
  • The Passage by Justin Cronin – A post- (and pre-) apocalyptic vampire novel that’s told in incredible detail (adding up to an overwhelming 766 pages). It was thrilling and suspenseful, addicting like a Stephen King novel (though not quite as bloody). It took a little bit to get used to the intricate prose, which often gave way more detail than necessary, but it also jumped around and kept the plot moving.
  • Old Man’s War by John Scalzi – This one takes the premise of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, inserts old people as the soldiers and runs with it. A fun idea and thoroughly enjoyable.
  • Redshirts by John Scalzi – An entire novel based on what happens when the expendable “Redshirts” of the original Star Trek TV series figure out how expendable they are. The set up alone is worth a mention here. The follow through isn’t bad.
  • Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers by Anne Lamott – This trippy Jesus follower breaks down prayer in a way that only she could. Short, sweet and a nice kick in the pants. Plus, it avoids some of her neurosis that can get a little old.
  • Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L’Engle -Finally, I gave a re-read to one of my favorite books. Such a great exploration of faith and child-like wonder and how an artist creates and what it means to be a person of faith creating stuff (of course she’s a little more eloquent than that).

Be sure to grab your copy of 137 Books in One Year: How to Fall in Love With Reading. (Insider tip: It’ll be free Feb. 5-7!)

Here’s the full list for January 2013:

  1. Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers by Anne Lamott
  2. Many Waters by Madeleine L’Engle
  3. The Arm of the Starfish by Madeleine L’Engle
  4. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
  5. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
  6. Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan
  7. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
  8. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L’Engle
  9. Feed by M.T. Anderson
  10. Divergent by Veronica Roth
  11. The Passage by Justin Cronin
  12. Redshirts by John Scalzi
  13. First Day on Earth by Cecil Castellucci
  14. Every You, Every Me by David Levithan

What have your read lately?

My Top 15 Books of 2012

So I read 137 books in 2012. I already gave the full list, but below are my top 15 favorites from the year. I shared this list in my recent book, 137 Books in One Year: How to Fall in Love With Reading, in which I explain how I managed to read so many books (and talked to someone who read a lot more books than me).

I tried to narrow my list down to a top 10, but there were just too many good books to talk about. So here we go:

  1. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
    Most of this book takes place in a multi-player online game (like World of Warcraft, only bigger), which makes it very geeky. For that reason I’m always a little hesitant to recommend it. But if you can get past that (and the author makes it very approachable), it’s an incredible story. Geeky and fun, full of pop culture references (both real and made up), fast paced with plenty of action. I already want to read it again.
  2. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
    Every time I tell people about this book they look at me like I’m crazy. It’s a funny story about two teens dying of cancer. See? Crazy. But it’s amazing. The teens are sarcastic and funny and full of life, even though they’re on the verge of death.
  3. Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
    I have a hard time getting into nonfiction, but this book tells a story that is so captivating it’s easy to forget it’s real. It helped that I got into running this year and found this book to be very motivational. Check out my blog post explaining the book and my own journey into running this year.
  4. Every Day by David Levithan
    This book didn’t just have a unique idea—a person wakes up in a new body every day—but the way it tackled that idea was so interesting and engaging. There were so many unique things: Like the fact that the main character doesn’t have a gender because they don’t have a body or the author’s willingness to go to difficult situations, like the body of a druggie in withdrawal, a suicidal case or an illegal child laborer. Plus, the actual story centers around a really good romance that gets to the idea of what we’re actually falling in love with.
  5. 11/23/63 by Stephen King
    Time travel and thwarting a presidential assassination? What more could you want? This one is long, but with Stephen King’s writing that’s no worry. There’s a love story in this one too, which makes the whole thing even more engaging.
  6. Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
    This one and World War Z are very similar—varied accounts of the robot or zombie uprising. The different perspectives make both books engaging, but Robopocalypse keeps coming back to the same characters and letting you see how they’re getting along. That makes it more cohesive and interesting, gripping to the bitter end.
  7. Without Warning series by John Birmingham
    At first glance, this series sounded stupid: A mysterious and impenetrable “bubble” descends on the United States and wipes out every living person, isolating most of the contiguous United States. But good stories aren’t about what happened, they’re about what happens now. (For example, I think LOST derailed when they tried to explain what happened. The show was interesting when they focused on what happens now. Mythology and explanations can be interesting, but they can also be a distraction.) Weird set up aside, the what happens now in Without Warning was engaging. It was fast-paced, apocalyptic action and—like a good Stephen King or Joss Whedon story—you never knew when a character might get killed. The second installment slowed down a little bit, but the finale picked up again.
  8. Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick
    Post-apocalyptic zombie horror. This one was crazed, edge of your seat action. The story had a lot going on, it kept up a frightful pace and the characters were engaging. As fast as it was, I also liked that the author knew when to slow down and let you feel safe again. My only complaint is that it’s the first in a trilogy, so there’s no sense of closure at the end (something I realized in horror with 40 pages to go).
  9. For the Win by Cory Doctorow
    I read three novels by Cory Doctorow this year and I was tempted to put all three on this list. But I went with For the Win as the best of the three. It’s one of those multi-thread stories where the threads eventually overlap and intertwine. As usual for Doctorow, he explores an interesting tech scenario and pushes it further. Good stuff.
  10. Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate
    This is a story told as a poem that can easily be read in one day. It’s the heart-breaking tale of a Sudanese boy who comes to Minnesota as a refugee. The free verse style does an excellent job of communicating the language barrier. It really  helps you understand the perspective of a refugee.
  11. Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
    A good kick-in-the-pants book for creatives. Short, simple and full of fun illustrations. Check out my review and interview with Austin Kleon over at Church Marketing Sucks.
  12. Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz
    I discovered this book during my first real trip to the South and it was timely. I’ve always been interested in the Civil War and coming to terms with the current take on the Confederacy has always been kind of weird. Good book to help me process some of that. My blog post exploring the book.
  13. Wrecked by Jeff Goins
    A great little book about how to deal with the incredible brokenness of life. Check out my review and interview with author Jeff Goins over at Church Marketing Sucks.
  14. The Search for Wondla / A Hero for Wondla by Tony DiTerlizzi
    I found this series to be delightful. It was just full of, well, wonder. Very childlike and engaging.
  15. Gone series by Michael Grant
    Another sci-fi story with a bubble, this one with a lot of trappings of Stephen King (oddly enough, he has his own bubble story I read this year). Gripping, engaging story, even when the premise seems ridiculous. In this case, all those bubble trapped teens started developing super powers. The series has ups and downs, but I think it’s worth riding it out to the end (the last book comes out this year).

What were your favorite books of 2012?

137 Books Video

I like to read a lot. That should be obvious. Especially since I wrote a book about how to read a lot. Said book launches next week.

So I’m in promotion mode, frantically emailing people, whipping up marketing ideas and every now and then enjoying that glorious moment when someone loves my book. And then slipping right back into the frantic terror you feel while waiting for the reactions to a creative project.

Today I created a video for 137 Books in One Year. I like to think I have a reputation for creating homemade videos, since that’s exactly the level of quality I can create: homemade. I did it for Foursquare in 2007 (wow, that was painful) and for the Table Project last year (not quite as bad), both projects where the idea was to make a video that was less than professional.

Of course this time my only excuse for being less than professional was because I am. I wanted to make a video that was slightly more than just me talking at a camera, without taking more than a day to do it. The result? Homemade goodness! Hey, I’m no Kid President.

Here it is in all its embarrassing, awesome glory:

Remember to pick up a copy of 137 Books in One Year: How to Fall in Love With Reading (the digital version will be free Feb. 5-7)